my skin story.

Before.

After.

Alright, time to discuss an extremely touchy subject, especially for me since I have struggled with acne for the majority of my life now. Let me start off by saying, I am in no way an expert on skincare or acne, my knowledge on the subject is rudimentary at best. But this is my experience, and I can only hope that someone can relate and even benefit from my story.

I believe severe acne and acne scaring/hyper pigmentation runs in my family, particularly on my mother's side. I've read somewhere that genes play a major role in how our skin behaves for the rest of our lives and I've found that to be mostly true in my case. I started getting extremely severe acne starting from around age 12 and lasting up until now in my early 20's. I treated it as best as I could, using ProActive for the majority of the time. At first, ProActive worked wonderfully for my skin and I had clear skin for about half the time I was in high school. However, the medications stopped working for my skin as soon as I graduated and enrolled in FIDM. From then on, my skin was pure hell, seriously painful and huge breakouts nonstop. I tried every recommendation, every mask, every sort of remedy I read about but nothing seemed to help.

It was only until I discovered a website which made such pure, perfect sense. It almost seemed ridiculous that I had not tried these things before. The website was acne.org, and it provides great information on how to take control of your skin as well as offering their very own regiment. I didn't opt for their regiment, but instead I simply took the website's advice and ran with it. 

1. Keep it simple. Not every ingredient or every chemical is necessarily good for your skin, keep it down to the bare minimum as far as cleansers, toners, and moisturizer go. The more invasive the chemical, the more harmful it is for your skin.

2. Stop using make-up wipes. This was a major revelation and it's probably the main reason as to why my skin was not clearing up. When you think about it, make-up wipes are pretty disgusting; you're pretty much taking all the dirty crap that's been on your face all day and rubbing it further into your skin. Use a cleanser instead and a eye make-up remover to get all your make-up off. 

3. Remove your make-up completely, every day.

4. Keep your make-up brushes clean. Another huge mistake I was making was not maintaining my make-up brushes, which again is disgusting once I realize what I was doing before. After each application, you should always wash your make-up brushes, especially your face brushes. That should be common sense.

5. Benzyl peroxide is your best friend. As far as spot treatments go, the only truly effective one I've found is pure benzyl peroxide, and thankfully you no longer need a prescription to get it! They sell it in forms as high as 10%. Generous applications of this to problem areas gets rid of every little spot, no joke.

And that's pretty much it. Ever since I've been taking these steps, I seriously never get break-outs anymore. All I have left to deal with is the scaring that all that acne left behind, but I'm planning on getting that treated hopefully in the near future. I hope this helps in any way possible because it helped me!